A new style of community development project is to be launched by Tauranga City Council to encourage and inspire community members to initiate projects in their neighbourhoods.

The initiative follows a workshop in Te Puke last year with international community development impresario Jim Diers.

The community's view of the Tauranga City Council building.

City councillors were so impressed with the initiative, they had to be talked about of doubling the $50,000 amount proposed for the pilot programmed following last week's meeting.

The intention is for the match fund to be available for one-off community projects where the community provides labour or materials in return for council funding.

The pilot fund is to split into ten $1000 small funds and two large projects of up to $20,000.

Council sustainability advisor Michelle Elborn says the match fund is to allow communities to actively participate make decisions.

She says it builds on the council's experience with volunteers and takes it up a notch.

'It creates community ownership of those projects when they are community led and it will certainly help to achieve outcomes that council staff can't achieve themselves.”

Project applications will be assessed by council staff with final decisions made at group manager level in the bureaucracy, with reporting back to the Community Development Committee.

Committee chair Steve Morris hopes the scheme will result in more city activists.

'It's always the same people putting their hands up for the volunteering. We have a community run on the smell of an oily rag as it were, and there's a few people out there getting burned out.

'Because of that we need to encourage broader volunteerism and we need more people. This is a way to do that because if you look at our history recently as a community, in my view we are demanding more and more from our councils with the result we have to pay more and more in rates more and more debt, higher levels of service.”

Steve says they really need to reverse the trend and engage the community and get the community to take back some responsibility for running the city and getting involved in projects.

Strategy group general manager Christine Jones says the match funding will dovetail with the City Partners programme with either money time or goods/materials.